Dec 172023
 

The twitterverse (or the 𝕏-hole) has been awash recently by far-right whinging about immigrants stealing our houses, jobs, and forcing us all to behave according to their notions of societal norms. And of course they are really spitting lettuce when it comes to the “invasion” of small boat refugees.

Really about what you would expect from a bunch of people with the intellectual capability of a syphilitic squirrel on acid.

The truth of the matter is that immigration is just a distraction from the real problems of the country and the Tories are quite happy that their mismanagement and corruption is being hidden by some extent by the ‘immigration issue’.

The ‘Small Boats Invasion’

Which the slack-witted will insist on labelling ‘illegal immigrants’; they are of course nothing of the sort. Refugees have a legal right to apply for asylum status and the sneaky Tories have very conveniently blocked every other method of seeking asylum. Leaving refugees no other way of getting to the UK other than the dangerous route of small boats.

What are they coming here for? Benefits? No of course not – asylum seekers are not entitled to benefits and are probably one of the most deprived groups in the UK. They are probably on their way here for a number of reasons :-

  1. The UK is a relatively safe place with a stable (if currently dysfunctional) government.
  2. English is a very widely spoken second language – if you were moving to a foreign country wouldn’t you prefer one where you already speak the language?
  3. They may well have existing connections to the UK – family, friends, or relatives.

The other thing to note about the small boat refugees is that the total is trivially small. In 2022, there were just 45,000 refugees coming by small boat (source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/irregular-migration-to-the-uk-year-ending-december-2022/irregular-migration-to-the-uk-year-ending-december-2022). To put it a more visceral way, if you were at the back of a queue to make a GP appointment that was 10,000 people long, you could shoot all the small boat refugees and reduce it by 7 people – not enough to really make a difference. Or even 12 if you were to include all the small boat refugees from 2018-2022.

Economic Migrants

There is a great deal of confusion amongst the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who go berserk at the mere mention of immigration – who seem to believe all the so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ are here to take British jobs. Which is complete rubbish of course – asylum seekers are not allowed to take jobs, and they’re a tiny proportion of the population as a whole.

And indeed a small proportion of legal immigration. As an example, in 2022 ‘net migration’ reached 745,000; an unusually high number. The net migration figure is immigration minus emigration, so there were actually 1.2 million legal immigrants.

We could stop that immigration overnight – just stop issuing visas.

And the NHS would collapse. And the universities would collapse. And plenty of other industries would collapse.

We need immigration to keep the economy moving.

Is housing shortage a problem? Of course it is, but it has been a problem since the 1960s – we simply don’t build enough houses and keep not building enough houses. Way back before most of us were alive (1970), the cost of a house was 0.7 times the average salary; today it is more like 9 times the average salary.

Are NHS waiting lists (and queues for GP appointments) a problem? Of course they are, but immigrants are less likely to use them than our ageing population. Frankly the problems of the NHS are down to under-investment and Tory corruption.

The figure of 1.2 million immigrants is unusually high, but we’ve coped with hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants for decades. Almost all of the problems supposedly caused by immigration are in fact caused by government incompetence.

Is it any surprise that all this fuss about immigration comes at most 13 months away from a General Election? When the Tories want to distract from their 13 years of malicious and shambolic government?

The Door
Feb 042017
 

I could choose to criticise Trump’s stand in immigration from certain countries based on the rights and wrongs of it, because it’s certainly wrong. But firstly there has been plenty written and said about that aspect of it, and secondly those who don’t see how wrong it is are not likely to change.

But even those who do not see how wrong it is may well be able to see just how stupid this move is.

Just to remind ourselves, Trump has temporarily blocked all travel into the USA by anyone holding a passport issued by seven countries which were previously subject to heightened visa requirements. And for good reasons – the relevant countries have more than their fair share of terrorist activity – and it is more than reasonable to check on immigrants to verify that they are not known terrorists.

The first “own goal” is that the new restrictions blocks many people from travelling to the USA who have made their homes there including famous people like Mo Farah (although the ban may not apply to him). How much safer is the US by blocking Mo from entering the USA and going home?  Or all the others in his position?

And let’s be frank – there’s something less than honourable about issuing a visa allowing someone to travel, and then preventing them from travelling. There are people who have planned the holiday of a lifetime and arranged to visit Disneyworld or Disneyland, and all of a sudden they are prevented from travelling.

Now you could argue that if this action decreases the risk to US citizens it is worth taking. But even if it does significantly reduce the risk, I would argue that it is better to accept the increased risk to do the right thing. And in general if you do not accept a slightly increased risk to do the right thing, you are a morally bankrupt person.

But does this decrease the risk to US citizens? To assess that we need to assess how great is the risk of terrorist attacks to the USA, and specifically terrorist attacks from those seven countries.

In fact the risk attributed to terrorism is vastly overrated. Going through the Wikipedia list of terrorist incidents, I get a total of 5 incidents causing the deaths of 50 people (the perpetrators excluded), which includes the Pulse nightclub shooting. If you go back to 2015, the figures are 4 incidents and 23 deaths, and one of the incidents was a christian terrorist.

Working through a similar list of mass shootings in 2016, I get a total of 14 incidents causing the deaths of 56 individuals.

Which is basically saying that you’re about as likely to walk into a terrorist incident as into a mass shooting, and both are really, really unlikely. That doesn’t help much if you are caught up in such an incident, so taking reasonable and proportionate action to decrease that risk is worthwhile.

And targeting refugees fits into the disproportional category; of those 5 incidents in 2016, only one was perpetrated by a refugee (and nobody died).

And now onto the final bit of stupidity: Firing your legal adviser for telling you an executive order is illegal when it is being found so over and over again makes you look more than a bit foolish.  Particularly when you could accomplish almost as much (although in reality more) by simply stopping new visas being issued; especially when the decreased risk from terrorism is marginal at best.

Feb 292016
 

So the Euroskeptics want a divorce between us and the EU; or in other words they want to go back to a time when we would protect our interests in Europe by going to war every generation or so. Which is a far more expensive proposition than EU membership fees, and far riskier.

Because the continent has always been there. And throughout history we have had to keep an eye on what the rest of Europe is up to, and intervene whenever France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, or Germany has been involved in actions that interfere with our interests. Being part of a club that can discuss contentious issues and tell a member to stop behaving badly is far preferable than the old way of doing things. And yes that involves giving up a bit of sovereignty.

When you come down to it, that little loss of sovereignty hurts the politicians more than the rest of us, and the rest of us are more likely to be the ones killed off in European wars.

Does it seem a little far fetched that leaving the EU will cause the return of European wars? Perhaps, but one of the reasons it seems far-fetched is that we do have an EU where we can go and argue. Without that safeguard, there is not a great deal to stop the return of the old ways.

Immigration

There is an assumption that leaving the EU will lead to fewer immigrants arriving in the UK.

Perhaps. At least in the long-term assuming we ignore the UN directives on refugees, but in the short-term there is a good chance that immigration will increase.

For a start, all those refugees and economic migrants from outside the EU won’t suddenly stop coming just because we leave the EU. Sure we’ll set up new border guards, but that will take time. And guards don’t stop everyone.

And what incentive does France have to co-operate over that migrant camp outside Calais? None of course; their interests would be best served by giving all the refugees a Eurostar ticket to move the refugee camp to Britain.

And what happens to all those Brits who have set up homes in the EU? Are they going to want to return to Britain? Is the EU going to force them? After all there is no natural right of residence for citizens of former members of the EU. Perhaps you would not count such returnees as “immigrants” but they would have all the same problems – needing a place to stay, and often needing income support.

And most of them would be rather annoyed.

Trade

The “outers” would have us believe that leaving the EU is an opportunity to make trade deals with the rest of the world to more than make up for the trade lost with Europe. Half our trade is with Europe, which in monetary terms is very roughly 230 billion a year.

In other words the “outers” want to put that 230 billion of income at risk in order to gain an unknown amount of trade through new trade agreements.

And what stops us making those trade agreements now anyway?

Regulation and Justice

Of course one of the big weapons the “outers” have is to claim that we would be freed from all that tedious European regulation. Well, perhaps but remember that 230 billion of trade with Europe? The EU isn’t going to let us export stuff to Europe if we don’t follow the EU regulation; it has always been the case that if you want to sell something in a market you have to meet the regulations of that market.

It is one of the reasons why the EU started regulation – to harmonise regulation across Europe so that you could meet one set of EU regulations rather than 28 different sets of national regulations.

And as soon as we get rid of EU regulation, we’re going to start getting British regulation instead. It won’t be a one-for-one replacement of course, but we won’t be losing as much regulation as we think.

There is a whole set of EU regulation that business universally loathes – the EU regulations that protect workers (such as the Working Time Directive). Well I for one think that European protection for workers is valuable; certainly our own government isn’t interested in protecting workers!

As to the European Court of Justice, the politicians are all up in arms about their power to overturn decisions made by parliament. Which must be very irritating for them, but ignore the whole “sovereignty” thing for a moment – don’t you secretly think it’s a good idea to have someone overseeing parliament? After all, it’s not as if politicians are trustworthy, so having some oversight is not a bad idea at all.

And people overlook just how useful the European Court of Justice has been to us – it wasn’t such a long time ago that France was blocking British beef imports on the grounds that British cows used to have this health issue. Of course what they were really doing was protecting French farmers. And the ECJ forced the French government to repeal laws that prevented British beef being imported.

And there are plenty of other examples where the ECJ has been helpful.

Unelected Bureaucrats & Democracy

You will often hear the phrase “unelected bureaucrats” (or even “eurocrats”) in association with the EU. You could almost imagine that politicians are volunteering to do some real work.

In reality government is run by unelected bureaucrats – when a farm inspector visited a farmer and told her that she needed to paint blue numbers on her cows and not red numbers, he would blame the bureaucrats; in the 1940s it was the civil servants in London; today it is the eurocrats in Brussels. It’s just a different flavour of bureaucrat.

And as for the EU being undemocratic, well the EU Parliament is trying it’s hardest to change that. And it’s the heads of national governments who are blocking such reforms. So when a national politician is complaining about undemocratic Europe, she is speaking with a forked tongue (how can you tell if a politician is speaking with a forked tongue? Their mouth is open).

The Edge

Fin

If you hadn’t already guessed by now, I’m in favour of staying within Europe. Sorry I meant staying within the EU. The EU is the future of Europe, and for better or worse we’re part of Europe, so if we want to have our say on the future of Europe, we had better stay within the EU.

 

Oct 062015
 

Well that speech wasn't much of a surprise; the Tories are busy blaming immigrants for every single one of their failings. It is hardly surpising that Theresa May is the one giving that sort of speach; she's on the lunatic fringe of the Tories and would probably be happiest if they brought back birching (especially if she got to wield the birch). 

Are you having trouble finding a house? The Tories say that immigrants are to blame.

Are you having trouble finding a job? The Tories claim that immigrants are to blame.

Did your cat go missing yesterday? The Tories claim that immigrants are to blame.

Is the TV on tonight boring? The Tories claim that immigrants are to blame.

Every sensible study into the impact of immigration into the UK has shown that they contribute far more than they take, and I for one am getting pretty sick of all this pandering to the fascist wing of the British public. It's also out of step with the mood of the nation – with many people looking at the Syrian refugee crisis and looking to help.

Anyone would think that the Tories are terrified that UKIP might start taking votes away from them, and have decided to adopt the far-right anti-immigration party's policies to steal their thunder. Not exactly the moral high ground.